legendof posted:

I have no idea what makes a pie chess related except for looking like a chessboard, so I'm going to go with that. This is easy to do with cake, but it's not quite as apparent how to do this with pie, largely because there aren't a lot of pie fillings that hold their shape well enough to maintain the pattern, much less ones that come in a dark and a light shade with roughly the same consistency. The closest thing I could come up with was vanilla and chocolate custard.

But then I was a little too lazy to make two separate custards, so I used instant pudding. I'm about to do horrible things to it, so I didn't figure it would matter much. I divided a cake tin that fits inside my pie pan with a strip of cardboard that I taped in place, lined both sides with cling wrap, and dumped my puddings in.



Then I froze them overnight, because I need them solid enough that I can cut them into squares. This is not a normal way to prepare pudding, but I wasn't really ever hoping this would TASTE good, and anyway I'm not sure how much you can ruin instant pudding.

This worked great, actually - I had to dunk the cake tin in hot water briefly to get the pudding-demicircles out, but I cut them into matching checkerboard halves without issue.



Meanwhile, I have made a pie crust (from scratch, because I have my pride with regards to pastry, although apparently not anywhere else) and have put it in the oven to blind bake. I'm not planning on baking this once I get the pudding in, so I want my crust precooked.



While that's baking I line my cake tin with cling wrap again and carefully squeeze my pudding squares in. This is a cold and slightly messy process.



This is the high point of this project. This looks pretty good, all things considered.

Here I have to decide how to get my pudding into my pie crust, which is fresh out of the oven. What I probably should have done was to stick the chessboard-pudding back into the freezer, since the pudding has begun thawing around the edges. But I had people coming over soon, and I was harboring a bit of a hope that I'd be able to serve (non-frozen) pudding pie sometime before tomorrow morning. So I just cooled my pie crust for a few minutes, then inverted the puddingboard over it.

This went... poorly. The bottom had thawed more than the top and the pattern wasn't quite as clear down there to begin with.



So I say gently caress it, I'm just going to microwave this monstrosity and we'll have a laugh and eat it. After about seven minutes of microwaving, it looks like this:



Apparently vanilla and chocolate pudding are a) not the same density, and b) not viscous enough to hold their shape at their room-temperature consistency. I saw the latter coming, but hadn't anticipated the former, and in combination the effect was that as it warmed up, the pudding began to rearrange itself to a layer of chocolate pudding floating on the apparently thicker vanilla pudding.

Furthermore, the parchment paper I put on top of it to keep boiling pudding from making a mess in my microwave has dragged pudding around the edges of the pie crust, making it look even messier.

I cut a "slice" of, uh, something that definitely isn't chess pie. Whatever, it's a bowl of pudding that happens to have pie crust in it also.



Instant pudding, by the way, tastes exactly the same post-freezing as pre-freezing.